Charlaine Harris - An Apple for the Creature

Rick studied his computer. Pea leaped to the bed and raced around the laptop, twittering, almost as if she were scolding it. Rick still had a pair of gloves on his desk from the crime scene and he pulled them on before carefully lifting the screen. He didn’t see it at first, and he never would have noticed it at all except for Brute’s nose and Pea’s verbalizations. A tiny black dot was on the black keyboard where he would rest his palms when not typing.

He had to get someone in here to check it out, but if he was going back into the moonlight, he’d need his MP player and the counter-spell music. He reached to the desk.

It was gone.

Shock swept through him, electric, hot. In an instant he was back at his first full moon, three days in a New Orleans cell, drugged to the gills, as his body tried to turn itself inside out, fighting to shift, struggling to change into the black were-leopard that was his beast. Tried and failed over and over again, held to his human shape by the mangled tattoo-spell on his shoulder and upper chest. The artwork bound him to his human shape, his human form, and stopped every attempt to shift. The full moon meant pain like being struck by lightning, pain like being flayed alive. Mind-breaking pain. He didn’t want to shift, didn’t want to be a were, but even that would be better than the three days of hell.

His heart thundered. He broke into a hot sweat. The world telescoped down to the desktop, empty of the MP player. Rick reached out and touched the surface of his desk. Gone.

He blew out a breath, heated and hard. He had uploaded the music to a cloud backup system. He could easily download it to his computer for instant listening.

He dialed Soul on his cell. “Someone’s been in my room and stole my MP player. They also left something on my laptop. Brute found it.” He described the tiny dot and added, “I’m in my quarters. And no, I didn’t touch anything except the light switch and my laptop, and I was wearing gloves.”

“I’m on my way,” she said.

Rick closed the cell. An hour later, his room had been swept for listening devices and video recorders, and the black dot had been confiscated. His room was clean, and Rick finally got to bed. He needed sleep, but he was edgy, restless, and couldn’t keep his eyes closed. The full moon sucked. Each one could be the last night of his life, or leave him permanently furry like Brute. That was enough to make anyone jumpy. Finally, Rick opened the laptop, downloaded the counter-spell, and hit Play, the laptop volume so low no human could pick it up. With the music playing in the background, he fell asleep.

At three twenty-two a.m., his cell rang and Rick fumbled for it in the dark. “Yeah,” he mumbled.

“Rick. Are you all right? Say something logical,” Soul demanded.

“E equals MC squared. Isosceles . . .” He yawned in the middle of the words and swiveled his legs up, sitting. “. . . triangle. ‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty,’ and so on. Will that do?”

“I just heard back from the lab. The black dot recovered from your laptop was LSD on absorbent blotter paper with a sticky-back. Someone wanted you incapacitated or out of control.”

Rick grunted, thinking. “The list of people who might want me to become dangerous, and who know where I am, is confined to the people on campus.” He heard Soul’s long, drawn-out breath at the accusation. “Mary and Walk—” He stopped, remembering that Chief Smythe wanted the name of the witch who recorded his counter-spell. Thinking about Polly’s sudden interest in him—keeping him out late so someone could get into his room? “Mary and Walker. Maybe Polly. And whoever wanted my counter-spell music.”

After long moments, Soul said, “We need to talk.”

“About Chief Smythe, who wants the name of the witch who made the counter-spell?” Rick let the harsh tone cops use on suspects grate into his voice. “Wants it enough to enroll me here, even though I’m dangerous?”

“We need to talk,” she repeated, her voice steely. “I’ll be there shortly. Meet me in the kitchen.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure.” He closed the cell and got up, dressed, and headed out. Brute and Pea were there first, Brute blocking the door, Pea riding on his shoulder. Rick reached for the leash, but Brute growled and shook his head slowly, the human motion utterly un-wolflike. Rick sighed. “Fine. But keep close.”

Outside, Rick leaned against the wall in the shadows and waited. Brute, however, went scent-searching. He started right at the door, his nose to the ground, and began a circular pattern, walking and sniffing in an ever-widening spiral. He was about twenty feet out when he stopped, his nose buried in a clump of grass. Even in the moonlight, Rick could see his ruff stand on end.

“Brute?”

The wolf chuffed and breathed in and out in short, sharp bursts. Rick had seen the wolf get scent-lost before, his wolf-brain taking over, leaving the human part of him behind, disoriented and confused. Dog people called it nose-suck, which might be humorous in a toy poodle, Chihuahua, or shih tzu, but not so much in a rottweiler, pit bull, or werewolf.

Pea scrambled down from Brute’s shoulder and inspected the tuft of grass with her nose as well. She scampered to Rick, mewling and chittering.

“Brute, are you scenting the person who put the LSD on my keyboard?” Brute didn’t react or respond, and Rick knew better than to touch him. Wolves had violent physical reactions to being brought off a scent-binding and he wasn’t in the mood to be mauled. “Brute?” He whistled softly and finally the wolf raised his head. His pale eyes were wholly wolf, feral. Rick went still, vamp-still, not even daring to breathe. The wolf growled so low Rock felt it vibrate in his chest. “Brute? Stand down. Stand down.” Pea launched herself across the two yards and landed on the wolf’s head with a catlike yowl. Brute yelped. In a moment, they were rolling around on the ground, roughhousing, the scent forgotten.

Rick blew out, letting the adrenaline rush melt away. “Brute,” he said, his voice a command. The animals’ heads came up fast. They stopped playing, and Rick could see the intellect again in Brute’s eyes. “Were you scenting the person who put the LSD on my keyboard?”

Brute dropped his head and raised it. Yes.

“Okay. Can you follow it? And not get scent-lost again?” Rick asked. Brute nodded. A small grim smile pulled at Rick’s lips. “Then let’s see where it goes.”

With Pea riding his shoulder, Brute turned, sniffed, and started running to the back of the Quonset hut, his nose to the ground. Rick followed at a trot. He was halfway around the building when he ran out of the shadows into the moonlight. The moon-call hit him. His breath stopped in his lungs; his muscles cramped in an electric spasm. He hit the ground face-first. The night vanished.

Rick woke slowly, the dark night full of scents. He knew where he was and who was with him by the scent patterns alone—the Quonset hut. Brute, Pea, and Soul were there. Soul was sitting on the edge of his bed; he was lying on the floor. His music was playing, the musical notes of the flute driving back the pain.

Even with the music, his skin burned as if he’d been flayed with stone blades, drenched in gasoline, and set on fire. All he wanted was to go back to sleep, find that dark and pain-free place he’d left upon waking, and stay there until the misery ended. Instead, he said, “That was really stupid.” The words were mumbled, but he knew he’d been understood when Soul laughed softly and Brute snorted.

“I do hope that is the last time you forget to carry your music when you go out under the full moon,” she said. “I brought my old MP3 player and downloaded your music. Here.” She leaned down and draped the cord over his head to rest on his neck, the speaker close by his ear. “Are you up to trying again, or shall the werewolf and I do this alone?”